The closing of West Ashley Hardware raises a bigger question about what a community loses when its businesses disappear
by Lorne Chambers | Editor
When Waylon Cain talks about the role of a hardware store, he goes back much further than West Ashley Hardware, the store he owned and operated for nearly a decade.
In the earliest American towns, Cain points out, the general store was often the center of commerce. In the towns of the Old West, before shopping centers, big-box retailers, and online delivery, it was where people bought what they needed, but also where neighbors crossed paths, exchanged news, asked for advice, and maintained the small connections that helped turn a cluster of houses and businesses into a community.
Cain sees a neighborhood hardware store as a descendant of that tradition.
For nearly a decade, West Ashley Hardware filled that role from its home on the corner of Wappoo and Ashley River roads. Cain opened the store in October 2016, after his mother had opened a hardware store on Edisto Island several years earlier. He had grown up around tradespeople and was the guy folks called when something needed fixing.
“I got into it because I was the friend who always fixed everybody’s stuff,” Cain said.
Over the years, West Ashley Hardware became a place to buy nuts, bolts, tools, paint, plumbing supplies, and all the other things one expects to find in a hardware store. But Cain says the real business was helping people.
He said he learned early on to listen to the tradesmen who came through his doors. In doing so, he learned a lot more than a pro tip on how to fix a leaky faucet or properly hang a door.
“They told me about their tragedies, their wins, we talked about their wives, their husbands, their kids,” he said.
One of his favorite memories goes back to the store’s early days, when a young father came in around Christmastime with his child and a Power Wheels toy that wasn’t working. The kid was upset, and rather than simply sell the father a part or send them somewhere else, the employees gathered around the Power Wheels and started troubleshooting it together. Cain compared the scene to doctors gathered around an operating table in an ER performing surgery. Eventually, they got it working again, and, in Cain’s words, had it “running like a Ferrari.”
There were stranger emergencies, too, including actual surgery. Cain recalled the time a fisherman showed up with a large shark hook stuck through the meaty part of his hand. They clipped off the barb and pulled the hook back through.
“When I asked him why he didn’t go to the hospital, he told me, ‘I don’t trust doctors,’” Cain recalled. He trusted the local hardware store.
Of course, the hardware store is also where people go when preparing for a natural disaster, like a hurricane or snowstorm, or to repair things following those storms. During the pandemic, people turned to West Ashley Hardware for various things as home projects moved from the back burner to the front while people were not going into the office or to social gatherings.
“When chaos happens, we’re the first place they come to,” said Cain.
That ended last month when West Ashley Hardware closed its doors for good.
And while West Ashley lost a place to buy hardware, it also lost something harder to replace.
That is why the final days hit him harder than he expected.
“I’ve never cried more in my life than on Saturday,” he said days after shuttering the store. “The two best things I have are my employees and my customers,” he said.
Cain made sure all 11 of his employees had jobs lined up before the store closed. He described the staff not simply as employees, but as a family, one in which everyone left a mark on the place.
MORE THAN A TRANSACTION
Jordan Amaker, Director of Advocacy and Communications for Lowcountry Local First (LLF), says the value of neighborhood businesses can be difficult to quantify because much of it exists outside the transaction happening at the cash register.
When one closes, she said, a community loses “a sense of community.”
“Oftentimes, it’s a ‘third place.’ It’s neighborhood-serving places. It’s the reason you pick where you live,” Amaker said.
“This has been a hub for people who wouldn’t see each other anywhere else,” said Cain.
There is an economic loss as well, explained Amaker. Independent businesses tend to purchase services from other local businesses, hire locally, and circulate money through the local economy. When one disappears, some of that circulation disappears with it.
And replacing it with another independent business is far from guaranteed.
“The odds of a local business going into that space are not high,” Amaker said.
That presents an increasingly complicated challenge for organizations like LLF, which has spent years encouraging consumers to support locally-owned businesses.
The message still matters. But Amaker said consumer behavior is only part of the equation.
“It gets harder and harder to do that when there is more and more convenience available to us,” she said.
In other words, the answer cannot simply be to tell consumers to do better.
“It’s not a ‘shop local harder’ issue,” Amaker said.
THE PRICE OF SUCCESS
It’s a familiar pattern we see in many established neighborhoods: The qualities that make a place desirable can eventually make it more difficult for the small businesses that helped create that desirability to remain there. It has happened on King Street downtown and in parts of Mount Pleasant. It is happening in communities across the country.
Amaker said commercial leases are an increasingly important part of the conversation when discussing small-business closures. More and more, we’re seeing property being valued not for what it’s worth today, but for what could potentially be built there tomorrow.
David Desplaces, a professor of strategic management and entrepreneurship at The Citadel’s Tommy and Victoria Baker School of Business, sees a danger in assuming that every business closure is evidence of a failed business.
“What you have here is a place that was successful and was part of the DNA of the community,” Desplaces said of West Ashley Hardware.
Desplaces emphasizes that closure shouldn’t be synonymous with business failure.
“The common myth is that nine out of 10 small businesses fail. That’s not true. They don’t fail. They choose to close for a variety of reasons,” said Desplaces.
Increasingly, the forces determining whether an independent business survives may have less to do with whether customers love it and more to do with real estate, commercial leases, access to capital, redevelopment, and public policy.
That distinction is important in the case of West Ashley Hardware.
Cain is adamant that there was no single culprit behind his decision. The final straw was a massive increase in his occupancy costs, driven not by a traditional rent hike but by rising property taxes and insurance costs that, under the terms of his lease, were passed along to the tenant. So while his base rent did not technically increase, his monthly nut skyrocketed along with the value of the property.
“The reason I closed was not because of the tax increase,” Cain clarified. “There were about 20-plus variables that I could not control. I tried.”
The loss of West Ashley Hardware also illustrates the difference between a neighborhood business and the much larger retailer that may sell many of the same products.
Big-box stores are built around volume and efficiency, Desplaces explained. A small hardware store can compete in a different way: through expertise, relationships, and helping a customer solve a problem that might require a 79-cent part rather than a $300 purchase.
CAN A CITY PROTECT ITS SMALL BUSINESSES?
The challenge facing West Ashley is not unique. Many growing suburban centers across the country are wrestling with how to preserve independent businesses without freezing neighborhoods in time.
Eric Pohlman, the City of Charleston’s West Ashley Project Coordinator for Planning, Preservation, and Sustainability, says that despite the closing of the only independent hardware store in West Ashley, the community continues to have a strong local economy.
“One thing that always gets brought up is, ‘We need more local business in West Ashley,’” Pohlman said. “But we do have a very thriving local business operation throughout West Ashley.”
Beyond storefronts and brick-and-mortar operations, Pohlman points to many tradespeople and entrepreneurs who operate businesses from their homes in West Ashley as a vital part of that local economy.
Pohlman regularly works with Lowcountry Local First and commercial brokers to connect local businesses with available spaces. The city has also put more emphasis on helping businesses navigate the permitting process.
Pohlman described the role as being a “Sherpa for the permit center,” helping entrepreneurs obtain the correct permits and avoid unnecessary delays.
“Time is money,” he said.
But permitting assistance does not solve the larger problem of affordability.
Pohlman said one idea he would like Charleston to explore more aggressively is treating affordable commercial space as something akin to affordable housing.
“When we get planned unit developments coming forward, we already have affordable housing in there now,” he said. “How about we have affordable commercial for that, too?”
Amaker suggests formula-based overlays, which can be used to regulate concentrations of standardized chain businesses in particular districts. This has worked in smaller areas like Folly Beach or Sullivan’s Island. Amaker pointed to other tools used around the country, including community benefit agreements negotiated as part of major developments. Such agreements can establish goals for local hiring, local businesses, and different tiers of commercial rent.
The point, advocates say, is not to eliminate national retailers.
Pohlman envisions a future West Ashley with “a mix of local, regional, and national brands that the community comes together and supports.”
His particular focus is the Sam Rittenberg Boulevard corridor, including the ongoing transformation around Citadel Mall and the possibility of eventually breathing new life into aging shopping centers such as Village Square.
“Sam Ritt is my focus,” he said. “It’s the heart of West Ashley, with the potential to have lots of different little pockets all along it.”
A SMALL-BUSINESS DESERT
Desplaces believes policymakers should consider the cumulative effect of losing independent businesses rather than viewing each closure in isolation.
“We’re familiar with the idea of food deserts,” he said. “Well, we’re trending toward small-business deserts.”
Desplaces does not argue that every business should be independent. Larger retailers can serve as anchors, providing products, jobs, and services that communities need. A vibrant commercial district, he said, requires balance.
“We should have anchors. It’s good to have them in vibrant communities, but it requires a balance,” he said.
Stores like Lowe’s or Home Depot aren’t inherently the problem, Desplaces said. The problem arises when the commercial ecosystem reaches a point where those are the only viable hardware retailers.
“Policies need to be enacted to preserve the balance and number of small businesses so we can preserve the fabric of the community,” he said.
The real question Desplaces seems to be asking is whether market forces alone can maintain that balance without some guidance from the powers that be.
Amaker believes municipalities do have policy levers available to them. Desplaces similarly argues that policymakers need to consider the identities of individual commercial districts and what residents want those places to become.
That may be especially important in West Ashley, a part of Charleston experiencing significant redevelopment while still holding onto pockets of an older suburban and small-town identity.
“I always hear about people feeling guilty for using Amazon. But it’s not your fault that Amazon is Amazon,” she said, arguing that public policy has helped create an environment in which small businesses are increasingly asked to compete on an uneven playing field.
Even still, Cain said the experience of owning West Ashley Hardware was ultimately positive.
“I don’t regret doing it. If I could do it over, I’d do it again,” he said, adding that he would even consider opening another hardware store if the circumstances were right, particularly if he could own the building rather than be vulnerable to forces outside his control.
Cain also hopes someone else will eventually operate an independent hardware store in West Ashley.
“People who run hardware stores do it because they love helping people get stuff done,” Cain said.
And that’s what he will miss most. It’s the customers who stopped in even when they didn’t need much. The employees who gathered around a child’s broken Power Wheels at Christmas. The tradespeople who shared their knowledge. The people who came through the door having a bad day and left feeling a little better.
“It’s a family,” Cain said.
And after spending a decade building that family, closing the doors left him with an unexpected sense that he had walked away from something much larger than a business.
“What I’ll miss most is the people,” Cain said. “I feel like I just abandoned a whole family.”
As West Ashley continues to grow and redevelop, the community faces a choice about what kind of place it wants to become.
Despite the closing of his store, Cain believes there’s still hope for West Ashley to preserve some of what made places like his store possible in the first place.
“It’s not too late,” Cain said. “The opportunity is still there to keep West Ashley a small-town environment.”
